NIBRS 2013 Home

The Advantage of NIBRS Data

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) was implemented to improve the quality of crime data collected by law enforcement by capturing detailed information on each single crime occurrence. Designed for law enforcement, the NIBRS has the flexibility to gather administrative facts on crime incidents as well as varied information about the victims, offenses, arrestees, and property involved in them. Accordingly, the offenses are categorized as Crimes Against Persons, Crimes Against Property, and Crimes Against Society.

NIBRS reporting provides information on most of the criminal justice issues facing law enforcement today—terrorism, white collar crime, information about assaults on law enforcement officers, offenses in which weapons were involved, drug/narcotic offenses, hate crimes, domestic and familial abuse including elder abuse, juvenile crime, gang-related crime, parental abduction, organized crime, and pornography, as well as arrest data related to driving under the influence. In addition, NIBRS reporting captures whether the offender was suspected of using drugs/narcotics or alcohol during or shortly before the incident and whether the offender used computer equipment to perpetrate the crime.

The information in this publication provides a glimpse into the power of NIBRS—its analytical value.

More than 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide report data to the FBI UCR Program. Although the program historically uses estimation procedures to account for missing data in presentations such as Crime in the United States, it did not apply any estimation procedures to the NIBRS data in this publication to account for missing data for jurisdictions that do not submit their UCR data via the NIBRS or of non-participating jurisdictions.